Thursday, March 30, 2017

Postmodernism Intro

It is a mix of a lot of different types of cultures. "Simply turn on the TV and you might hear a world music group singing a blend of Irish love song, Indian raga, heavy-metal anthem, Mongolian Buddhist chant -- and all to the tune of peyote drums, gamelans, didgeridoos, panpipes, nose flutes, alpenhorns, sitars, and tambourines."

Artists try to go back into the past centuries and plug in the unknown and try to represent it.

"These postmodern artists or architects simply take note of the new mix of messages, symbols, cultures and media, and then create a video, song, painting or building that reflects the Postmodern condition." This quote shows what a postmodern artist's main goals are.

Realism -> Modernism -> Postmodernism

Jean Baudrillard

Social microcosm is what draws the crowds to Disneyland, not the imagery.

Outside in the parking lot is nothing special, but once inside, it is like an entirely new world with much more gadgets to use other than your car.

"Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real: country, all if "real" America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of hyperreal and of simulation."

Jameson

Two different ways to read Van Gogh's painting of peasant shoes. The first way being for sheer decoration, the second way is to stress the raw materials, the initial content, "which it confronts and reworks, transmaterials are to be grasped simply as the whole object world of agricultural misery, of stark rural poverty, and the whole rudimentary human world of backbreaking peasant toil, a world reduced to its most brutal and menaced, primitive and marginalized state."

"This equipment," he goes on, "belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. . . . Van Gogh's painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth. . . . This entity emerges into the unconcealment of its being."

There is definitely a warning of postmodernism art. It is easy to just view what the art has on its surface.